One Way to Venice

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  “Good God, no,” said Julia, almost as much taken aback by her unwonted tears as he.

  The attendant was already on his way down the swaying corridor to knock on a closed door, open it, and make his appeal in swift French.

  “Quit yabbering.” Julia recognised the furious voice. “Or if you must, do it in English. You’ve seen my ticket, boofhead! What’s with you now?”

  “There is a lady,” began the attendant in halting English, then turned, saw Julia behind him, and switched with relief into French. “Madame, if you would explain?”

  Julia had only seen the young man’s back at Victoria, but the accent was unmistakable. He had to be the Australian who had been so dramatically abandoned by his girl. The compartment, with only two of its three berths made up, confirmed this. He had paid, heavily, for privacy, and was now alone with his disappointment. But at least, she congratulated herself, there was little chance that he had noticed her at the far end of the compartment at Victoria. She explained her predicament quickly, and saw the scowl deepen across what should have been a handsome, dark-browed face. He took a deep breath, and, for a moment, she steeled herself against a furious refusal. Then, lopsidedly, he smiled. “Why the hell not? All a box-up together. You don’t mind. Why should I?”

  “Oh, thank you!” She turned to the attendant, and found, as she had expected, that she was to pay all over again for the berth the young Australian had booked.

  “He sure rooked you,” said the stranger, when the man had accepted his tip, wished them a faintly salacious goodnight, and withdrawn.

  “Well, of course. Frankly, I’m past caring. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. My name’s Julia Rivers, by the way. Mrs. Rivers.”

  “Tarn Menzies. ‘Strine, as you’ve probably guessed, but no kin to the Prime Minister. Ex. You Pommies call it something funny, right? Mingies? Crazy lot.” He put out a firm hand and took her case. “Shall I sling this on the rack?”

  “Thanks.” She had her night things in the huge, elegant shoulder bag Sir Charles had bought her. Putting up her bag, he reached down a fat briefcase from the luggage rack. “You look bushed. About the way I feel. Sit down, girl. Put your feet up. Bad journey?”

  “Not really.” Remembering the disaster of his, she felt a qualm of grateful sympathy as she obeyed him. Since only the top and bottom berths had been made up, it was possible to sit quite comfortably on the lower one, and she leaned back for a moment and closed her eyes, only to open them again at the unmistakable sound of a popping cork.

  “Not champagne,” he said. “Second-class, that’s me. Inferior substitutes only. Not a big rape scene either, in case you were wondering. Fact is”—he took a hard breath—”I’m mopy as a wet hen myself. My Sheila scrubbed me, back at Victoria. She was coming to Dubrovnik, for the ride. We had a bit of barney and she slung off. So—my tough.” Holding the bottle in his left hand, he produced two surprising silver mugs from the briefcase and handed them to Julia.

  “Lucky for me.” She handed one back to him, so that he could pour steadily against the swinging of the train.

  “Proper fool I feel.” He filled his own mug and propped the bottle in the corner of the briefcase. “I was doing my nut till you came along. Now, my oath, I’m famished. How about you?”

  “Ravenous.” She took a fortifying swig of dry fizz. “I’m a fool. I thought there’d be a restaurant car.”

  “Always read the small print.” Sitting on the far end of the berth, he delved in the briefcase and produced the most heart-rending picnic Julia had ever seen. The girl in the fur cape had had expensive tastes and Tarn Menzies had done his best to cater to them. There was a plastic container of smoked salmon, and another of olives: mixed black and green. There were joints of cold chicken with a faint tang of lemon about them; firm tomatoes and slices of Cheddar cheese flavoured with port. Handing her a pear, “No dessert,” he said. “Pam won’t touch it. Weight problems.”

  “I couldn’t eat another thing.” And then. “I am so sorry.”

  He shrugged. “No use whipping the cat. More wine? We can’t recork it, and it should give us a good night.” His laugh was harsh. It could hardly, she thought, have been the wine’s original purpose. But she was glad of it. Combined with the good food, it was easing the day’s tensions out of her. Only—a tiny alarm rang somewhere at the back of her mind—was it, just possibly, doing the same thing, rather too effectively, for him? Was there not something faintly predatory in the way those dark, heavy-lidded eyes were considering her? And if there was one thing she could do without, it was finding herself stand-in in a seduction scene. She must fend him off, tactfully, now, before things went any further. But how? Well: the wine glowed in her; there was an easy way. Nothing so convincing as the truth. “I’m sorry if I’m not very good company,” she said. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “Tough.”

  The lazy unconcern of his tone goaded her into speech. “I’m looking for my son.” After all, a son, usually predicates a father.

  “Mislaid him, have you?” The dark eyes, wide open now, considered her quizzically.

  “You could call it that. Precisely.” Her own voice was bitter in her ears. “I had him adopted. At five days old. It took me five years to realise what I’d done.”

  “My oath!” She had his full attention now. “Why? You did say—Mrs. Rivers?”

  She had forgotten how it felt to blush. “Yes. But, you see, it was no good.” The train hummed and muttered. The wine was strong in her. Did it feel like this to enter a confessional, tell all, and be absolved? “It was his family,” she found herself explaining. “Breckon’s. My husband’s. Ex-husband’s,” she amended bitterly. “We had to live with them. He’d inherited the lot, you see. He felt responsible for the others. He said I didn’t understand. But I did!” How often she had argued it with herself. “They hated me. All of them. Right from the first. Then, they started trying to kill me. He wouldn’t believe it. Said I was crazy, like the rest of them. Well, I suppose it did sound crazy.”

  “Still does. Crazy as Christmas.” But he was listening. “Where did this all whirl up?”

  “In America. That’s just it. You see, we met in Paris. I was there on a job. It was ‘love at first sight.’“ Bitterness put quotes round the words, and, as she spoke, she remembered how furious Sir Charles had been. “Breckon was American. French-American, from way back. They were Rivière , really, not Rivers. From Charleston, South Carolina. Soon after we were married he inherited the estate and we went back there. A great, big rambling house in the middle of a swamp. All the family living there. A very strange lot. Furniture from before the Civil War. Only they called it the War of the Northern Aggression. And someone tried to kill me. I fell in the river. Have you ever seen cedar knees?”

  “Cedar whats?”

  “Knees. Great big roots that stick out of the water, and saved my life. I hid among them, and held on, and prayed to God he wouldn’t find me.”

  “He?”

  “Or she. No way I could tell. They all hated me. It could have been any of them. Except it couldn’t. They were all together, Breckon said. They said. And that was funny, too. His being there. Back from Charleston so early. He found me. Saved me, you could say.” The half-voiced suspicion was one she never admitted even to Sir Charles.

  “Tough.” She thought he believed her. “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing, that time. Except try and persuade Breckon to move into town. No use. He thought I was hysterical. I’d been dreaming again, you see. Nightmares. I used to have them when I was young. They stopped, when we married; then, at La Rivière , they started again. Worse...I used to wake up screaming...I suppose it was no wonder he thought the whole thing was my imagination.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  “No. It wasn’t. Though, do you know, for a while, I actually tried to make myself believe that—believe he was right, that I’d imagined it all. But I couldn’t. And then, of course, the fire settled it.”
/>   “Fire? Stone the crows, but you had yourself a ball, girl! Don’t tell me that husband of yours said that was just another accident.”

  “Oh, yes. The wiring was a million years old. Everyone knew that. But what I wanted to know was, who drugged the nurse?”

  “Sounds like a good question.”

  “It was a good question. Only no one answered it. So then I moved out. To a hotel. I thought Breckon would follow me. He didn’t.” Memory of those days of waiting, of the letters, the telephone calls all unanswered was bile in her mouth. “Sir Charles came instead. My boss. I’d written to him. He said the whole thing stank. In the end I went back to England with him. Well—it was a job. A good one. And, he said—Sir Charles—more chance for Breckon and me in London away from his family. If he came.”

  “Did he?”

  “In the end. Too late. I’d started the divorce proceedings. In fact, I got my final decree the day after—” She felt herself blush again, remembering that one night of pure happiness; the morning’s bleak aftermath. After the long silence, Breckon had arrived, unannounced, at the office, and swept her out to dinner and so back to her flat for that one night of the old ecstasy. Only, in the morning, as once before, had come the bombshell. He was, simply, taking it for granted that she would come back to La Rivière with him. And, trying to explain her refusal, she had heard herself, with a kind of instant horror, blurting out the admission that she had even found herself suspecting him when she was attacked there before: “We can’t go back to that.”

  The words had died at sight of his face. “You thought I—”

  He had put down his coffee cup, reached for his jacket, and left her. For good. It should at least have cured her of loving him, but, unbearably, it did not even do that. When she discovered, too late, that she was going to bear his child, she had tried to hate him, failed, and, for a while, horribly, found herself almost hating the unborn child instead. Poor little creature. She would never forget the late, difficult, lonely birth; the quick, as quickly stifled gasp from doctor and midwife, and then their determined, intolerable cheerfulness. He was not only illegitimate, her little boy—he had a bad arm, too.

  Tarn Menzies was quick. He seemed to get the bones of the wretched story from her incoherent phrases. “If it had been a girl,” she said. “I’d have kept her. I think. Boys need a father. Sir—my boss said that. And then”—she drank the last of her wine—”it was a boy, and—like that. The doctors said I would never manage. It was going to take money, lots of money, for treatment. And—I’d refused alimony. I had to work. They all said it would be better for me, for both of us.” She still remembered her shock of surprise when Sir Charles said that. “I gave in,” she said. “Signed the papers. I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “Tough. But when you changed your mind, surely you could trace him?”

  “That’s what I thought. At first. It was a blank wall. Oh, he’d been lucky, they told me, my nameless baby. A marvellous adoption. And one stipulation. Absolute secrecy. Well: fair enough. What right had I to know? I suppose that’s what they thought. The adopters. In a way, when I found that out, I felt a little better. At least he must be in good hands. But now…”

  “Now?” he prompted, as she paused.

  “God knows.” She poured out the story of the anonymous letters, the photograph, and now the train and hotel bookings.

  “Queer thing about the sleeper,” he said at last. “Did you confirm the hotel?”

  “No.” Doubt about this had been nagging at her. “But I’ve plenty of money. And it’s early in the season. If they don’t recognise my voucher, I ought to be able to book in there just the same.”

  “And then?”

  “Wait,” she said. “What else can I do? Until they choose to get in touch. If they do.” She was dangerously near to tears again.

  “You’re tuckered out,” he said. “And no wonder. Fill in those forms of yours and I’ll take them down to the man while you put yourself to bed. Fifteen minutes?”

  “Ten,” she said. “And thanks for everything.”

  “My pleasure. I was pretty damned low myself when you turned up. You’ve done me good.” He laughed his rather grating laugh. “I’ve not thought of Pam since you started your story, Scheherazade. And now, sweet dreams. Things will look better in the morning.”

  “They could hardly look worse.”

  He paused, with his hand on the half-open door. “No silly sleeping in your clothes, mind. Tonight, I’m a sheep in wolf’s clothing.”

  “You’re an angel.”

  “Thanks!” He quirked a black brow and left her.

  Relaxed with wine and food, and the telling of her story, she was actually half asleep when he came back, and it was easy enough to pretend to be entirely so, listening to him make his quiet preparations and then climb into the upper berth. How lucky, after all, she had been. Thinking this, she slept, rousing occasionally when the train stopped, with the inevitable bustle in the corridor, but going off again, deeply, each time. At last, light waked her. Tarn Menzies had pulled up a blind. She looked at her watch and was amazed to see it was eight o’clock. “Lord, I’ve slept.”

  “Good.” She heard him moving about above her, then a pyjamaed leg appeared, and he swung himself to the ground and reached for a silk dressing gown bought, she suspected, for this ill-started venture. Gathering up his clothes, “I’m off to the john,” he said. “Ten minutes?”

  “Make it fifteen.”

  Returning, he reported that they had acquired a breakfast bar in the course of the night, and they were soon lurching down the train to queue for croissants and passable, expensive coffee. They ate for a while in a curiously sociable silence, then he looked across at her. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yes?”

  “I think you should go back home. I don’t like the sound of it. Any of it. Can’t think what that boss of yours meant by letting you come.”

  “I had to.”

  “But you said yourself you feel as if these people hate you. Enjoy torturing you. Have you ever been to Venice?”

  “No”

  “It’s the kind of place anything could happen. Full of dark corners, and wet water. I don’t want you to end up drowned, Scheherazade. Once is enough for that.”

  She laughed. “I wish you’d call me Julia.”

  “Thanks. But, seriously, why not pack it in and take the first train back from Milan?”

  “And never know? You must see I can’t. Not after the picture. He’s real now. Dominic…” Her voice lingered lovingly on the name.

  “Hooked, aren’t you? Just the way they meant you to be. Well, then—” He rose to lead the way back to their compartment. “Could you use a bodyguard? I reckon you could do with one.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’d sure like a bash at it.” He paused to let a fat woman hurry to her breakfast. “We were coming back to Venice after Dubrovnik, Pam and I. No reason I shouldn’t switch plans and do Venice first. I’m an illustrator.” He sounded as if she should have heard of him. “I’m doing a book on Venice and her trade in the Middle Ages. Dubrovnik’s hardly changed at all. Can’t say that for Venice, can you now? Might make sense to start there, get it over with.”

  “But your reservations?”

  “No grief. I’ll have to switch to a single anyway.” His voice deepened with remembered anger. “My good luck it’s early in the season. I won’t get in your hair, word of a ‘Strine, but I’d sure like to join your wild-goose chase.”

  “You think that’s what it is?”

  “Hope so. Safer that way.” He pushed open the door of their carriage. “Goodoh, he’s fixed it. Where did you say your hotel is?”

  “The Da Rimini. Across the Grand Canal from St. Mark’s. Do you know Venice?” At what point had it been settled between them that he would join her?

  “Not well.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and produced a red travel-agency folder. “That’s why it figures to start th
ere.” He selected a leaflet. “Mine’s near the Rialto. Looks good and central. Far from yours?”

  “Not as the boat steams. But are you sure?”

  “As shooting. I’d be biting my nails for you. And besides”—his eyes glinted under the heavy brows—”what a gas—eh, Scheherazade? They won’t be reckoning on me, see? They think they’ve got you there all on your little own. Lamb to the slaughter. And all the time, there I am with my sketchbook, watching.”

  It was undeniably a comforting thought, but reminded her at once of a conversation she had had with Sir Charles. He had wanted to hire an escort for her, but she had refused, convinced that if she did not go alone, as “they” had planned for her, they would never get in touch. She explained this, now, to Tarn Menzies, and he nodded quick agreement. “I should have thought of that. But no harm done so far. Just chance we shared the carriage. Right? Least I could do to buy you breakfast, and let you stay here till Milan. There we split. Should we quarrel?”

  “I don’t see why.” She was remembering his scene with the girl—Pam—the day before. “We hardly know each other well enough.”

  “Too right. And too bad. Besides—no reason why I shouldn’t go overboard for you. Every reason I should. So—at Milan, in case they’re really watching, you ditch me, cool, quick and casual. Good-bye and thanks. Your reservations should be OK from there on, you think?”

  “I hope so.” It was curiously daunting to realise that she would not, after all, have his comforting presence at her side when she reached the unknown city.

  It must have shown in her face. “Don’t look so crook, girl.” His smile was warming. “You ditch me, but there’s no law says I stay ditched. I’m not a fool, see. And I’m over the moon for you. So—I’ve read your labels, haven’t I? I’ll phone you, every night, at the Da Rimini, and you go right on saying no, till you hear from them. Then you think again. No—” He paused, considering, “That won’t wash. You don’t want me cluttering onstage just then. We’ll have to think of a code. Let’s see. Every night, I say, full of hope, ‘Mrs. Rivers! How about lunch tomorrow?’ If you’ve not heard from them, you say, sorry, you’re booked.” He stopped. “What the hell do you say if you have heard?”